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Permalink Reply by alexweir1949 on July 21, 2008 at 5:45pm

Very low-cost payments are an essential part of fighting poverty in some 3rd world countries. Check cd3wd.com/SPS/ as a highly secure ultra low-cost technology for achieving this. best regards, alex weir, harare and london

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 23, 2008 at 6:37am

Kris Dev, I have a question: what needs to happen to make your idea move forwards? What do you need? Is it a question of local government support? National government support? Financial support from NGOs? New technology?

Tell us what you need to make this go forwards.

Thank you,

Vinay

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Permalink Reply by Kris Dev on July 23, 2008 at 8:21am

Vinay et al,

Thanks for pursuing the topic of unique biometric identification.

The answers to your questions: What needs to happen to make your idea move forwards? What do you need? Is it a question of local government support? National government support? Financial support from NGOs? New technology? are as follows:

Conviction: I am convinced. You need to be convinced. Jospef, Thomas, Alex and many more need to be convinced. We need as many like minded people as possible to join in.

Organization: If yes, we can form a global non-profit consortium, similar to ICANN, to implement a open system of unique global citizen identification.

Technology: We need to identify a very simple yet fool proof technology (Vinay, Josef and Alex can contribute on this). It should be easily implementable in any country.

Adoption: Citizens and nations should voluntarily take to it, like internet, if they find value. It should be accepted as a way of life for identifying citizens.

Support: Global / Local NGOs can support the initiative. Governments could come forward to adopt it, similar to One Laptop Per Child.

Sustainability: It can be on a pay per use model for sustainability.

I had made a post today, published in the Indian newspaper on the brazen display of huge amount of hard cash on the floor of the parliament, said to be given as bribe in the cash-for-vote scam.

"Corruption and bribery have become the order of the day. It is time, we demonetize currency and banned currency circulation. We must also have biometric smart cards linked to a single bank account as debit card for all transactions and make it public to stem corruption".

What do you and others in this forum think?

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 23, 2008 at 3:52pm

Well, clearly I believe that we need to find a wise way to use biometrics before some government or international agency implements a foolish way - which is already happening.

CheapID attempts to address the cost issues associated with smartcards, and the privacy issues associated with biometrics in general - we don't want to empower government spying, for example. If biometrics are used in a careless or casual fashion, eventually the abuse will be unbearable. Making it safe to deploy such a powerful technology globally requires exquisite care.

What did you think of CheapID?

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Permalink Reply by Sepp on July 23, 2008 at 6:17pm

Agreed with Vinay here.

Let's do it before governments get around to finalizing their versions. Open source ID that is universally recognized. :-)

Could be a very useful thing, especially if it can also be used for on-line identification, for instance in a direct democracy voting scheme.

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Permalink Reply by Kris Dev on July 23, 2008 at 6:54pm

Unique Citizen ID can be used practically for any thing and every thing including online identification and voting.

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Permalink Reply by Kris Dev on July 23, 2008 at 6:58pm

We can adopt CheapID with a rename. But in my opinion, it should not result in secrecy and some authority to control / seek details. It can lead to power broking and blackmailing. If every thing is made transparent, there can be no spying by any one. The power of the governments would stand withdrawn as governments consist of citizens whose transactions would also be transparent. We can create a global village.

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 23, 2008 at 9:03pm

Ok, this is where we need clarity.

CheapID only does an ID card. It doesn't do transactions.

You can use the CheapID card to sign contracts (that's the "professional witness" part of the CheapID proposal) which are anonymous because your CheapID card is anonymous, right up until your identity is decrypted under a court order.

So I guess we'd be talking about a banking scheme which was not anonymous, right? Something where people had a public account that was tied to both their biometrics and a public log of their bank activities?

Is that the approach you have in mind, Kris Dev?

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Permalink Reply by Kris Dev on July 24, 2008 at 4:09am

Yes. Can we use the CheapID in combination with biometric for all transactions on a non repudiating basis? It could be anonymous or public, depending on the choice of the individual. However, it should enable a track back to all their transactions, on a specific query by any one to the system? We need to evolve this concept to make it acceptable to users, giving them flexibility of use and at the same time removing the secrecy shrouding transactions to catch wrong acts.

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 24, 2008 at 5:49am

Tricky, tricky. CheapID was written to be very inexpensive, to work in the poorer parts of the world, to be very low cost, but it is designed to protect individual privacy so their government and police forces would have a hard time spying on them and abusing the biometric databases.

What you're looking for is total transparency, where everybody can see everybody else's transactions, so the issue of government snooping is done away with by simply leveling the playing field, so that everybody's deeds are exposed not just to government but to their peers.

This is definitely another approach. In the domain of privacy, some people call that approach "the participatory panopticon" - everybody watches everybody, removing the government's power.

Seems like the main problem you see is corruption, and the main problem I see is totalitarianism.

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Permalink Reply by Kris Dev on July 24, 2008 at 6:32am

Transparency without totalitarianism, is what I think we need to achieve. In a democracy there should be no superiority. All are equal before law and all should be bound by transparency. Today this is not happening in practice, though in theory it is so. Even judges do not want to declare their assets in developing countries! False declarations, unaccounted wealth, corruption, etc. is ruling high. You cover me - I cover you is the game going on among the rich and powerful making the common man poorer. Hence the need for a unique identification and tracking to hold the individual accountable by/to the public.

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 24, 2008 at 2:22pm

Perhaps one approach would be to make this a condition of public office, so judges and politicians have open accounts as part of their job, but the public can continue to live in privacy?

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